Il8 ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR 



therefore participating in the formulation of its program and apprised of 

 its results, were medical officers of policy-making rank: the Chief of the 

 Division of Preventive Medicine, Office of the Surgeon General of the Army, 

 and the Chief of the Research Division, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery 

 of the Navy. 



If the criterion of success is to be results, the liaison must be adjudged 

 successful. Many of the advances in military medicine made during the war 

 were the consequences of CMR research. Some of these advances were 

 promptly transferred to the field. But it would be fatuous to say that the 

 arrangements for such transfer were perfect. 



The most effective co-operation was secured when something beyond the 

 formal net of liaison was created. Two of several such examples occurred 

 in the fields of malaria and aviation medicine. That in malaria has already 

 been recited. Representatives of the Surgeons General, who were experi- 

 enced field investigators in the subject, functioned as voting members of the 

 Board for the Co-ordination of Malarial Studies. In aviation medicine, the 

 Chairman of the NRC committee continued his association with its activi- 

 ties after entering the Navy, and the Division Chief for CMR was Co- 

 ordinator of Research in the Office of the Air Surgeon, Army Air Forces. 

 In both fields the committees were accurately informed of the needs of the 

 Services. In both fields their research findings were promptly transferred 

 into practice. 



The converse is equally true. In other fields of medicine and surgery, in 

 which the contacts of NRC committees and CMR with the Services were 

 less intimate and personal, the effectiveness of the work was correspondingly 

 less. This is evidenced by the value, universally felt, of the information 

 brought back by those CMR missions who had contact with troops in the 

 field or by medical officers who had served in foreign theaters and, return- 

 ing for some other purpose, talked informally to CMR and NRC com- 

 mittees. The opinion of CMR that numerous and frequent missions to the 

 fighting fronts to orient investigators as to conditions actually confronted 

 there were to be desired was overruled by the Surgeon General of the Army 

 on the basis of his more intimate knowledge of combat situations. 



Several successful examples of civilian and military co-operation occurred 

 at Army General Hospitals and at civilian laboratories. Such investigations 

 were carried on in the field of tuberculosis and psychiatry at Fitzsimons 

 Hospital, in the penicillin study at Bushnell and Halloran, and in the 

 studies on convalescence at Gardiner. The permission extended by the Sur- 

 geon General for civilian investigators to use troops for research upon 

 fatigue and water deprivation has already been mentioned. 



Liaison is a two-way road. The difficulties of getting information from 

 the field to investigators in the States have been mentioned. The corre- 

 sponding difficulty of getting information from the States into the field 



